We received more than one nomination for “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, which won this year’s National Book Award for fiction. One nominator quotes the book’s publisher in describing the book as “a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The author creates a scenario in which the underground railroad was a physical thing.” Another nominator calls it “a moving, tense, thought-provoking and important book.”